UX Research + Design Thinking
Supporting LA Small Businesses
ABOUT DESIGN FOR AMERICA
Design for America is an idea incubator, a way of approaching complex challenges, and a life-long community of learners.
MY GOAL
In 2019, we noticed an increasingly gentrified area around the USC campus. After we researched further, we realized that small minority businesses were struggling to resist being pushed out of their own communities.
The Challenge
Our mission was to provide an interactive platform for small food businesses to market their products, share their stories, and provide live updates.
1. Better understand the community's struggles and analyze pain points.
2. Design an interface that intuitively allows local business owners to market their products.
THE DESIGN
From extensive secondary research we noticed a couple key points.
1. Local food businesses use, almost solely, word-of-mouth communication to reach out to their customer base.
2. Review sites, such as Yelp, can detrimentally hurt small businesses with just one negative comment.
The research:
THE DESIGN
3. We were looking to appeal to local college students as well because we noticed that a large part of local business' customer base was students.
The research:
SUMMARY:
